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Frustration with Office - especially writing

LibreOffice was fine up until the end of the 4 line, but ever since 5 appeared they keep changing things around so much that it is like learning some totally new package all from the beginning.  When I write a document I rarely ever use fancy formating but some basic stuff, about margins, columns, tabs, etc shouldn't be a science to adjust.
I tried abiword for a little while from main and AUR when in Manjaro-OpenRC but did not want to work on my machine.  Screen flickering, vanishing cursor, etc.  The same pkg on Debian/Devuan on the same machine works fine.
I tried ApacheOpenOffice and it seems like libreoffice from 10 years back with irritating colors and graphics.
All other text editors I have tried are either incapable of formatting a page, do not do a spell check or even a basic word count, and can not even compare in functionality with MS-write/wordpad.  It is amazing that the linux world is so poor in this respect.
Anyone knows where I can get a copy of the last 4xx LibreOffice?

Re: Frustration with Office - especially writing

Reply #1
I had the same exact problem and wished to have kept the old one.  For a while LibOffice-still was like 4 but it changed as well.  If you don't use these things on a daily basis one day you open it up and it is a new piece of software.  As soon as it become just like MSOffice then msoffice changes and then they follow.

Re: Frustration with Office - especially writing

Reply #2
You can always get the last 4.x libreoffice from the Arch rollback machine (or whatever is called days, I use downgrade). From what I see there's libreoffice-still-4.4.7-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz stored somewhere, but you'll probably need to downgrade other stuff (like boost). It's worth a shot.

Re: Frustration with Office - especially writing

Reply #3
I would rather use some virtualization method or another way to separate it from the system, because whatever package you will try to install you will end with dependency hell.

My first thought was to use docker and install it there, than i looked at the libreoffice website and found older versions of it.

So here is link with the older version which you can download (deb, rmp, src, windows):
https://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/old/

But you will probably still end with some kind of hell, so you might also try AppImage version:
https://libreoffice.soluzioniopen.com/index.php/old-versions/

I did not try it personally but it is worth a shot.